Whenever people attend trade shows, meetings and other activities that bring together groups of people, it is often desired by people at those gatherings to schedule several meetings with different individuals. Similarly, it is often desired to make reservations for appointments at such establishments as restaurants, salons, and automobile servicing centers. Additionally individuals often contact other business and social contacts to confirm scheduled meetings, or to modify plans for existing arrangements. In these cases a conflict oftentimes arises in the new schedule that must immediately be resolved, or else one of the events creating the conflict will not be attended by all members of the expected group. When this happens frequently one or both of the scheduled events will not be successful.
In the past, people scheduled appointments by telephone, fax, or perhaps by a brief informal meeting to arrange a convenient time for longer appointments. Notations about these appointments would typically be written in pencil on a paper calendar until the appointment was confirmed. Confirmed appointments would be written in ink on paper calendars. The amount of erasures and strikeouts in most busy business person's paper calendar attests to the inefficiencies of this type of appointment scheduling.
Recently, computer-based systems have been developed that essentially automate the manual procedures outlined above, and allow individuals to make entries about appointments into computer based calendars. Programs like GROUPWISE, by Novell, Inc. and other have endeavored to improve upon the appointment and scheduling process, but instead they have succeeded in creating complex proprietary systems that require custom software on each computer, specialized hardware, and often operate within limited proscribed network environments. This result falls far short of fulfilling a need in the art for technology that coordinates myriad schedules, and facilitates making appointments with people in disparate locations, time zones, and computing environments.